Although
Philip Massinger will never be estimated above the second rank
of Elizabethan playwrights, he is becoming more and more admired
by modern readers and critics because of his qualities of simplicity,
saneness, and dramatic (rather than lyrical) effectiveness. He
belongs to the third and last generation of Elizabethan writers
for the stage, since he was born in 1584, established his contacts
with the theater just as Shakespeare
was beginning to bring his work to an end and as Beaumont and
Fletcher were producing their most famous plays, and died in
1640, just before the closing of the theaters by the Puritans.
Massinger's birth into a family of education, his early patronage
by the Pembrokes, and his partial education at Oxford, all started
his career under favourable auspices. When he left college for
London without a degree, probably about 1606, he seems to have
gradually won for himself the confidence of such men as Field,
Tourneur, Dekker, and Fletcher, with
all of whom he eventually collaborated. His work with Fletcher
from 1613 to 1623 for the King's Men has given his own friends
and contemporaries, such as Sir Aston Cockayne, as well as many
later scholars, plenty of opportunities to claim for him large
portions of plays generally attributed to the more famous member
of the intimate partnership which succeeded that of Beaumont
and Fletcher on the retirement and death of the former. With
the exception of 1623 to 1625, when for some unknown reason Massinger
transferred his talents to the Queen's Men, his characters were
created for the King's Men during the remaining years of his
life. But, although he wrote many plays, both alone and in collaboration
with other dramatists, he was never prosperous, and is known
to have borrowed money at least once from old Philip Henslowe.

A New Way to Pay Old Debts and The Maid of
Honor represent [Massinger's] work at its best and most characteristic,
for his two fortes were comedy and tragi-comedy; tragedy he is
known to have practiced rarely, in such plays as The Duke
of Milan and The Fatal Dowry, although Bishop Warburton's
unfortunate cook is reputed to have consumed the manuscripts
of several of Massinger's unprinted plays in his culinary operations.
A New Way to Pay Old Debts, which was printed in 1633
and perhaps acted in 1625 or 1626, is not only one of the few
Elizabethan plays which could be successfully produced for a
modern audience almost without alteration, but, because of its
being founded directly on Middleton's
A Trick to Catch the Old One, it also affords an extremely
interesting comparison between the spirits of the two men as
well as between those of their generations. For in this comedy,
as well as in his tragi-comedy, The Maid of Honor (printed
in 1632 and probably acted less than a decade before), Massinger
reveals himself as close to the cleanest and most high-minded
of the playwrights of his age, though unluckily the same statement
cannot be made about all of his writings, some of which are gratuitously
coarse. Not only morality but also religion often bear leading
parts in his works, although there is no necessity for accusing
him of turning Roman Catholic because he presents adherents of
this church in a particularly heroic light in some of his plays.
His women are especially attractive, and in fact offer more variety
and interest than his men, who, like his plots, tend to lack
originality. The story of The Maid of Honor, for instance,
derives from Boccaccio's "Camiola and Rolande" through
the intermediary of Painter's Palace of Pleasure.

This article was originally published
in Elizabethan and Stuart Plays Ed. Charles Read Baskervill.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1934. pp. 1355.